Redesigning Dashboards for slicker visuals and better performance

So you may or may not have encountered a dashboard with way too many charts and reports. This is fairly common in a lot of projects. If people aren't sure about what they want, they might as well put them all on the page. The look and feel might attract certain audience because there are different charts, different shapes and colors on one page. However, there can be problems as well. One of the thing to remember is that if 1 dashboard page has...

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OBIEE 10g to 11g upgrade challenge ---dealing with unexpected floor function

Hello all It's been a little while since I posted. I was busy re-platforming and upgrading all of our BI system to 11g. They was a lot of work but it was fun and challenging. Moreover, there was a lot of lessons learned from that, which I will post in detail later on. Today, I just want to share something real quick. One of the thing I immediately noticed after upgrading to 11g was that all of my reports stopped working on the dashboard when passing...

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OBIEE Case study --- How to ensure reporting the right data that is time sensitive part 3

The second approach that I talked about earlier was about adding the history records into some of the fact tables that are updating at daily level. That means the below model will have to change To this: From OBIEE side, we remove the join between Date and LSP PWE Config fact, and snowflake the model in BMM Layer. From the reporting side, we will have 2 filters: 1. Date = date prompt value and hour = hour prompt value (These values will...

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Invalid state Identifier Error Code: GV3MWW29 on OBIEE Dashboard

Have you ever seen this error message before? Below is what Oracle says about this error and how to fix it, the original document can be found in Oracle support metalink with the support ID: 1087513.1 Applies to: Business Intelligence Server Enterprise Edition - Version: 10.1.3.4.0 [1900] to 11.1.1.5.0 [1308] - Release: 10g to 11g Information in this document applies to any platform. Symptoms An Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise...

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OBIEE Case study --- How to ensure reporting the right data that is time sensitive part 2

In the previous post, I have stated the scenario and the things we have to look at before making any decisions. Knowing the right questions to ask, we get the right answers that will matter to our design. In my case, for the 4 things I listed in the previous post, the answers are below: 1. How often are the dimension tables updated? Does it keep history or not? --Dimensions get updated whenever there is an update. Therefore 3 columns in all dimension...

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OBIEE Case study --- How to ensure reporting the right data that is time sensitive part 1

Hello again. Today I want to talk about a scenario we face in our project. In terms of OBIEE, we know we have to create reports and dashboards to show data. How to ensure we show the right data? Data means nothing when the concept of time is out the windows, specially when it comes to performance related data. In other words, when you are reporting your sales performance, financial performance, you always have to look at a specific time or time range in order to have the number make sense to you. How do you ensure you are getting the right data...

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How to configure session time out time in OBIEE

Today, let's talk about something real quick and simple here. Have you ever wondered why after being idle for a while, when you resume your tasks in OBIEE, you are logged out? That's because you have wondered off for quiet sometime and the system logged you out due to inactivity. So knowing this behavior, how do we control the time that OBIEE should allow user to be idle before logging them out? The configuration is done in instanceconfig.xml...

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a general approach to performance tuning in OBIEE

A long time ago, I wrote an article about performance tuning in OBIEE, in which I stated the importance of minimizing performance issue by having a good project direction and a clear understanding of the BI Concept. This is the ensure the project with clean design, optimized process so that we won't even running into a lot of the performance issues later on. Remember, a bad design, wrong process and mismanaged expectation are the root cause of a lot of the issues we potentially face on our path. Applying fixes, workaround and changes attempting...

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Basic External table authentication with password encription

Hello Today, I want to talk about some real basic stuff in OBIEE 10G, which is external table authentication. I know there are many similar posts out there on the internet, I still want to post my own version. This is not to show off or anything, just so I don't have to memorize these things in the future if the article is kept in my own space. I know that we are talking about 11G nowadays, everybody is talking about cool things they can do with...

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OBIEE The application of creating sub-report to filter another report

Hello guy In the creation of OBIEE, we all know that we can use 1 report's result set as filter condition for another report. This is called sub-report, the equivalent SQL statements from the log is then nested query. Today, I want to talk about 1 good situation where this technique can be very helpful. Now look at the below report. This report provides a lot of PWE ID from the left. Now, I want to create another report, the second report...

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How to report data dynamically based on user's personal time zone setting -- Part 3

So from the last time I took a step further to solve the issue of reporting based on time zone, although it wasn't 100% correct, at least it opens up a few options. The conclusion there was that we need to find a way to dynamically choose the time zone offset value and use it for our time conversation. Where I was stuck was at the daylight saving changes that happens from all over the world. Therefore, I have decided to introduce a time zone...

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How to report data dynamically based on user's personal time zone setting -- Part 2

The previous entry has concluded the problem with implementing reports based on different time zone, this time we will proceed with the possible workaround. One thing we have realized is that, the time stamp being displayed on the report is changing according to the user locale, this means it occurs per user session. We definitely should take advantage of such feature, now we have to figure out a way to capture the time zone offset value for each...

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